DEATH OF AN EX, Vandy Myrick series of Black woman PI mysteries

DEATH OF AN EX
DELIA PITTS (Vandy Myrick #2)
Minotaur Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$28.00 hardcover, preorder for delivery 15 July 2025

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Delia Pitts expertly writes about family, race, class, and grief in her mysteries. Vandy Myrick captured readers' and critics' hearts in Trouble in Queenstown. She returns in Death of an Ex, where Vandy tries to piece together what brought her ex-husband's life to an end.

Queenstown, New Jersey, feels big when you need help and tiny when you want privacy. For Vandy Myrick, that’s both a blessing and a curse. Now that Vandy’s back in “Q-Town”, her services as her hometown’s only Black woman private investigator have earned her more celebrity—or notoriety—than she figured.

Keeping busy with work helps Vandy deal with the grief of losing her daughter, stitching the seams, cementing the gaps. The memories will always remain, and they come crashing back to the surface when her ex-husband, Phil Bolden, walks back into her life. Promising everything, returning home, restoring family. Until she answers her door to the news that Phil has been murdered. And Vandy decides Phil is now her client.

It’s hard to separate the Phil that Vandy knew with the one Queenstown did. She sees him—and their daughter—in Phil’s son, who attends a prestigious local high school. She sees the layers of a complicated marriage with his wife. She sees all of Phil’s various parent, husband, businessman, philanthropist. But which role got him killed?

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Phil was not a nice man. Phil, dead, is now out in front of the world as a not-nice man. Vandy harbors the sentimental fondness for the man she had her only child with, and she also harbors the very very recent memory of the fabulous ex sex they had hours before his murder.

Vandy's new enough in her return to Queenstown (see link above for the first book's review) that the cops, although they must interview her, do so without the usual presumption of guilt such a connection to a fresh murder would bring. Suspicion of her, probing her possible motive, but not a full-on attack on Vandy the person. Since we see the entire proceedings from inside Vandy's head, that felt startling to me. I'd expect to feel very defensive if I was being asked these questions! But Vandy, ex-cop, present-day PI as well as person of interest, sees from a perspective I won't have. And that is why I so enjoy these stories.

Vandy, thinking with her gonads, retains a fondness for the man she impulsively, and disastrously, married long ago. He was and is a skilled lover which clouds her cop-judgment. It doesn't hurt that he fathered her now-dead daughter, and that he's intelligent, articulate, and knows how to say the right thing.

This is the profile of a successful con man, as well...and Vandy's trawling through Phil's life after he left her life lets her know how close to a much bigger disaster than she was in she came. A single mother has hurdles...the wife of a con man has mountains to climb, much like Phil's current wife does. Did she take Justice into her own hands? A slick front with a slippery, dishonest man behind it could make any honest woman mad enough to do the unthinkable...or is she all that honest...? What Phil knew, how he knew it, all the secrets and skulduggery, could be known to her....

Every turn of Vandy's investigation is like that. She has access to the Black community the white police guys don't, and she isn't under the same time pressure to clear the case off the books. Not to mention the fact that the great and the good of Queenstown do not want the dirt Phil knew or the way it connects to them to be revealed. Even if it means some innocent outsider takes the fall for what she did not do.

It's a solidly constructed mystery with fair-play clues and a seriously sharp social conscience. Vandy confronts the prejudices within the racist US system, proving humans will do anything to be able to look down on their fellow humans. Vandy chooses the guilt/innocence dichotomy as her perch. And repeatedly gets knocked off it...proving that Delia C. Potts is a worthy successor to Barbara Neely in the social-realist PI/amateur sleuth genre. If there's a better mystery out in 2025, I haven't found it yet.

So where'd that fifth star go? There are stylistic details I found diminishing my pleasure in the read, like repetitions of revelations and what amount to "when last we met..." chapter summaries. I can, in context, see how these made sense to Author Pitts; I do not like them.

Not enough to skip the next book, though. Soon, please.

I LEAVE IT UP TO YOU, do not read while hungry!

I LEAVE IT UP TO YOU
JINWOO CHONG
Ballantine Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: From the award-winning author of Flux comes a dazzling novel about love, family, and the art of sushi that asks: What if you could return to the point of a fateful choice, wiser than before, and find the courage to forge a new path?

A coma can change a man, but the world Jack Jr. awakens to is one he barely recognizes. His advertising job is history, his Manhattan apartment is gone, and the love of his life has left him behind. He’s been asleep for two years; with no one to turn to, he realizes it’s been ten years since he last saw his family.

Lost and disoriented, he makes a reluctant homecoming back to the bustling Korean American enclave of Fort Lee, New Jersey; back into the waiting arms of his parents, who are operating under the illusion he never left; and back to Joja, their ever-struggling sushi restaurant that he was set to inherit before he ran away from it all. As he steps back into the life he abandoned—learning his Appa’s life lessons over crates of tuna on bleary-eyed 4 AM fish runs, doling out amberjack behind the omakase counter while his Umma tallies the night's pitiful number of customers, and sparring with his recovering alcoholic brother, James—he embraces new roles, that of romantic interest to the male nurse who took care of him throughout, and that of sage (but underqualified) uncle to his gangly teenage nephew.

There is value in the joyous rhythms of this once-abandoned life. But second chances are an even messier business than running a restaurant, and the lure of a self-determined path might, once again, prove too hard to resist.

Why do we run from those we love, and why do we still love those who run from us? A highly entertaining and poignant story about second chances and self-discovery, I Leave It Up to You pilots through the loss, love, and absurdity of finding one’s footing after the ground gives way.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: The Bear starring Daniel Dae Kim, only queer. Like that show, it's about the people doing the work of feeding others not the act of making and serving the food.

The lead is Jack, Junior. He has never been one to deal with anything he can run away from; waking up from a coma to find that his fiancé has moved on with his own life without a proper ending...well...it's a condign punishment. Far more unnerving is having to return home to the family he treated the way his belovèd treated him.

Being Korean, they take him in; being Korean, there's a steep emotional cost to their reintegration of the queer prodigal. Now it's all on Jack's shoulders to do the thing he ran away to escape...run the restaurant that supports them...plus make his amends for the truly terrible, and in their ancestral culture deeply dishonorable, way he abandoned them.

Their homophobia does not excuse him of feeling guilt even in his own mind. He's forced to grapple, belatedly but inescapably, with coming of age and coming out instead of running away from this existential conflict. Delaying this always complex and usually painful process does not make it one bit easier. A raft of new complications are added on top of the old, homophobic ones: what the hell is COVID? Why won't his fiancè talk to him? How can he presume to advise his nephew, son of his recovering-alcoholic brother, on life when he has royally screwed his own? Can he learn to want the legacy of restaurant-running his deeply unhappy father and super-pragmatic mother are so desperate to wish on him? How can he ask Emil, the nurse who cared for him during his coma, to be...to be...well, what exactly does he want Emil to be?

You can see how the layers and the complications bring to mind Carmie and The Bear. It's not like a mystery novel, it's more like an episodic show, in that you're expected from the get-go to invest in the people doing the stuff rather than the stuff being done. I'll always batten on any story that takes a man on the emotional journey of self-discovery, self-actualization. It's much more interesting to me than another facile-but-fun falling in lust/love/like in any order story could be.

I can't quite offer all five stars because the story can't quite offer enough of an ending. Yes, Jack is on a new road through life. He has a sense of himself as in control of more of his life than ever before, and gets that from a very realistic decision to let go of many of his self-limiting beliefs. This is done, however, by implication. No scene illuminates this decision, and that absence...likely done to avoid being smacked in the face with it...means Jack continues to *feel* to readers like his old self but inexplicably making better decisions. Umma, the mother, is short-shrifted as a person...like she would be in the culture she comes from. It felt a bit raggedy of Author Chong to give her a mysterious boyfriend and not do more with it. Chekhov's gun, anyone? And the bigly under-thought-through inclusion of COVID and its impact on the small family businesses of the US. The loving, delightful use of use of evocative description for sushi ingredients, preparation, and its cultural resonances for this Korean family made me wish to see more of this cursory subplot. Describing the food and leaving the business underlying its service out wasn't fully satisfying.

What was satisfying was the manner of Author Chong's incorporation of Jack, JUNIOR'S, queerness. Yes, a point of conflict; no, not a source of rage and rejection. Jack's running away was more of a problem than his sexuality.

I love this story's good parts a lot, I think the author deserves our eyeblinks and treasure. A very good story well-told is a thing we all need.

TROUBLE IN QUEENSTOWN, first Vandy Myrick mystery from Delia Pitts via Minotaur Books

TROUBLE IN QUEENSTOWN
DELIA PITTS (Vandy Myrick #1)
Minotaur Books
$28.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: With Trouble in Queenstown, Delia Pitts introduces private investigator Vandy Myrick in a powerful mystery that blends grief, class, race, and family with thrilling results.

Evander “Vandy” Myrick became a cop to fulfill her father’s expectations. After her world cratered, she became a private eye to satisfy her own. Now she's back in Queenstown, New Jersey, her childhood home, in search of solace and recovery. It's a small community of nine thousand souls crammed into twelve square miles, fenced by cornfields, warehouses, pharma labs, and tract housing. As a Black woman, privacy is hard to come by in "Q-Town," and worth guarding.

For Vandy, that means working plenty of divorce cases. They’re nasty, lucrative, and fun in an unwholesome way. To keep the cash flowing and expand her local contacts, Vandy agrees to take on a new client, the mayor’s nephew, Leo Hannah. Leo wants Vandy to tail his wife to uncover evidence for a divorce suit.

At first the surveillance job seems routine, but Vandy soon realizes there’s trouble beneath the bland surface of the case when a racially charged murder with connections to the Hannah family rocks Q-Town. Fingers point. Clients appear. Opposition to the inquiry hardens. And Vandy’s sight lines begin to blur as her determination to uncover the truth deepens. She’s a minor league PI with few friends and no resources. Logic pegs her chances of solving the case between slim and hell no. But logic isn’t her strong suit. Vandy won’t back off.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Middle-aged female protagonist with a dementia-addled parent needing care and an aversion to the snares of monogamy plus a healthy libido? Sign me up.

Smart judge of character, possessed of real, professionally gained investigative chops? Intelligent woman who suffers no fools and has a bit too much freedom of tongue? Head of the line.

We Ma'at followers don't get gifts like Vandy all that often. I was delighted by her, by her casually-but-effectively drawn world, and the challenges she faces. They're not tied to her Blackness, they're not tied to her womanness, they're informed by those facts of her life of course but they don't arise from them. Her father in a memory-care facility? Happens to ever more of us as living longer expands the chances of developing some kind of dementia. Coming home to care for her dad is another increasingly common life-event. Needing to find a way to support oneself with the skills of a lifetime yet being inescapably tied to one's family's past is another very common experience to those of us at a certain age (or well past it, but still able to remember the weird double expectations).

The book doesn't pull any punches or give any unrealistic takes on Vandy's relationships with Queenstown's police. They're not orcs out to club her into a pulp; they're not sensitivity-trained good boys, either. They're bog-standard misogynists and racists who do their jobs without much reflection, or much actual malice. They have to solve cases, so they do; that sometimes means corners get cut. That's not okay with Vandy. Her role isn't to teach the cops; it's to catch the guilty and make sure the cops can't ignore her findings.

Why then isn't there a higher star rating? Because some tropes are deployed as shortcuts in the identification of the guilty party that were, shall we say, unsubtly foreshadowed. Klieg lights and klaxons aren't subtle hints. Now, I have read a lot of mysteries and a lot of puzzle-solving ones in that mass. I'm not going to demand authors surprise me to get good marks, because next-to-no one would meet the standard. Not to mention other people don't have my ideas about what counts as a clue, or a trope. So in the case of this story, I rate it four stars because I feel sure y'all will enjoy meeting Vandy, spending time in Queenstown, and seeing how the town works when its social fabric is ripped by the gross insult of murder.

I'm in for the next one. Soon, please, thank you please.

BLACK IRISH BLUES, a follow-up to OUTERBOROUGH BLUES & WARSAW FURY, a WWII story we need Right NOW

BLACK IRISH BLUES: A Caesar Stiles Mystery
ANDREW COTTO
Black Rose Writing
$3.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Black Irish Blues is the return-to-origin story of Caesar Stiles, an erstwhile runaway who returns to his hometown with plans to buy the town's only tavern and end his family's Sicilian curse.

Caesar's attempt for redemption is complicated by the spectral presence of his estranged father, reparation seekers related to his corrupt older brother, a charming crime boss and his enigmatic crew, and—most significantly—a stranger named Dinny Tuite whose disappearance under dubious circumstances immerses Caesar in a mystery that leads into the criminal underbelly of industrial New Jersey, the flawed myth of the American Dream, and his hometown's shameful secrets.

Black Irish Blues is a poetic, gritty noir full of dynamic characters, a page-turning plot, and the further development of a unique American character.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER AT THE AUTHOR'S REQUEST. THANK YOU.

My Review: The first Caesar Stiles mystery, Outerborough Blues, was a big hit with me. I liked the atmospheric evocation of places I knew, at the times I knew them. I really enjoyed the writing Author Cotto clearly enjoyed writing...I hope that makes sense, I can't figure out how to fix it. Let me try this: When a writer can evoke a specific and precise feeling in me, attached to a specific and precise location in space and time, it comes across to me as that writer is sharing their own pleasure in that image, that moment.

It was too much to hope I'd get it again. I steeled myself as I opened the Kindle file. "It's not going to be the same, don't load that onto this book, it won't be as fresh as the first time," I gently self-talked myself off the ledge of inflated expectations.

"You know what my mother used to say about martinis?" I asked him.
...
We locked eyes until a small smile creased his face and he spoke in a bemused tone.

"No, no. Tell me. Wha'd your mother used to say about martinis?"

I put the knife down, wiped my hands and leaned into the bar, toward the man who needed to know the two Martinis rule.

"They're like boobs," I said. "One's not enough, but three are too many."

And just like *that* I'm right back in Caesar Stiles' world.

What happens next is the kind of thing that happens in the world of people like Caesar: running from, finding out they ran to instead; people don't know you, until they show you how well they got you pegged; a world that doesn't care about you until you find out how much they care what you do, and to whom. (And Foghat on the jukebox! Gawd...it was the 90s, all right.) But what makes this feel so familiar is also what makes the plot work. Get the tropes? Got the course.

Is that a good thing? It is in Author Cotto's hands. I like what he does with the way you're expecting something to happen, to come from a specific direction and involve some pretty familiar events...and that's what happens, only not the way you thought it would. The reason a trope (eg, the Irresistible Outsider Hero bagging all the sex) is an evergreen is that it works. It's not like one needs to challenge the evergreens to prove one's Talent. It's more like, "give 'em what they want but make it 60° off the straight lines."

This is what Author Cotto does with Caesar's story.

Helping out fellow-returnee Mike the local cop (home from LA) in solving the vanishing act pulled by Dinny, the unloved rich-guy Martini-story recipient; learning how Sallie, the dead brother from Outerborough Blues, continues to screw with his life; discovering good dirt on the long-vanished father he really didn't miss...all the noirness any committed reader of 'em could want. And delivered in the same compact form! Today's book-bloat has downsides, like heft and prolixity; it has upsides, like room to explore characters' motivations and present the world of the book; but best of all, in my opinion, is finding someone who can make Fat Elvis work in a few sentences without the bloat.

And here we are. Come for the atmosphere, stay for the story. And pray like hell that we get more Caesar in our lives.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

WARSAW FURY: A WW2 Polish Resistance Novel Based on True Events
MICHAEL REIT
Kindle Original
$4.99 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Warsaw, 1939
We mustn't let darkness win.

Natan Borkowski has it all. In line to take over the successful family business, his future is set.

Julia Horowitz lives in poverty. The daughter of a shoemaker, she dreams of a different life—a different world.

Everything changes when Hitler’s armies invade Poland. Natan’s future is ripped away by the flick of a switch of a Luftwaffe pilot. When the smoke clears, Julia and her family find themselves locked within the walls of the newly-formed Jewish ghetto.

On opposite sides of the wall, Natan and Julia’s lives are not so different anymore. As the Nazis unleash a reign of hunger, terror, and death across the city, they must now decide what’s more terrifying:
To die on their knees, or go down fighting?

Based on true events, Warsaw Fury is a story of love, courage, and resilience in the face of unimaginable evil.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE AUTHOR, THE BOOK WHISPERER, AND NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: World War II and the Final Solution and German/Polish antisemitism. All the things I claim repel me like kryptonite does Superman, garlic does Dracula, and Old Spice does a metrosexual. What transreversal of my brain was enacted by which Doctor Who aliens, what cabal of soap-opera writers flipped my script, whose malign curse on me altered my tastes? None. All these tropes are in this thriller, and I still read it.

They all still do repel me, though.

So how did that rating appear up there, the one that doesn't have a minus sign in front of it, the one that's above three but below five? Perspective. Not just mine, the story's as well. I'm down for a story whose *background* is WWII, but whose events while factual and tied to WWII, are not using WWII as the reason for the story.

Natan is a rich kid, a guy with social skills and connections; Julia is not possessed of either of those things; what brings the two of them together in this story is how they each hate and fear the Germans who have invaded their country and are murdering their people. Both lost their parents, each has a wise (if young) head and a fierce heart to avenge those who are unjustly dead. The whole story isn't about the brutal regime trying to exterminate all the Poles, every Jew, anyone who isn't Just Like Them.

We are instead told the two interlinked tales of resourceful young people motivated by a catastrophe they never asked for and weren't consulted about doing every single dangerous, difficult, and deeply necessary thing to stop, reverse, and fix their world. The planet needs them, or their great-grandchildren, now. These two characters, people on either side of a literal and metaphorical wall, are united in their purpose to resist, to expel, the invaders wreaking graphically told havoc on their home. They unite despite their "differences" because the goal they serve is more important than the surface dissimilarities that actually make each well-suited to their respective roles. And, because of course they did, these two crazy kids fell in luuuv. Despite their wildly different backgrounds, though, at least this couple could never possibly lack for something to talk about....

The story doesn't belabor the points I'm calling out here. I am doing so. I am explaining how, despite being a story told in a setting I'm ever so sick of, I got involved in and inspired by Warsaw Fury. Author Reit clearly knows his subject inside out, which adds to the pace of action he achieves and sustains. There is never a lack of action, and it's all grounded in real events.

So that's the story. What about the writing? Well, what indeed. It is unexceptional but unexceptionable. It isn't stellar and it isn't execrable. It is the high end of serviceable, the lower edge of inspired. Occasional phrases made me cringe...a Varsovian, a Pole, and you'd fight to the bitter end, oh now really...but it got the job done.

You're looking at that rating right now, aren't you. Thinking about the times I've said much harsher things about much milder stylistic infractions. You know, you're correct, but you're also looking at this from the ordinary perspective. This is an extraordinary case. I gave a book whose writing I reluctantly allowed to happen to me four full stars...doesn't that say something a lot bigger than "read these pretty sentences" would?

We need this story of coming together to resist an overwhelming, unstoppable crisis. We need to read things that stress our only hope being to find the good intentions and best practices in those we'd normally never so much as fire a neuron for. This story, a fact-based one, tells us that when we're pulling in the same direction, we can move the damn Nazis and their weapons on down the road.

Uncurl your lip, Sunshine. Get the memo here: Fight now, fight hard and with all your power...but aim it where it will help not where you think you want to.

MAD MOUSE, second Ceepak & Boyle Jersey Shore mystery

TILT-A-WHIRL (John Ceepak Mysteries #1)
CHRIS GRABENSTEIN
Chris Grabenstein
99¢ Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: There isn't much sun in the fun when a billionaire real estate tycoon is found murdered on the Tilt-A-Whirl at a seedy seaside amusement park in the otherwise quiet summer tourist town of Sea Haven. John Ceepak, a former MP just back from Iraq, has just joined the Sea Haven police department. The job offer came from an old army buddy who hoped to give Ceepak at least a summer's worth of rest and relaxation to help him forget the horrors of war. Instead, Ceepak will head up the murder investigation. He is partnered with Danny Boyle, a 24-year-old part-time summer cop who doesn't carry a gun and only works with the police by day so he has enough pocket money left over to play with his beach buddies at night. In the first novel in a new series written in the spirit of Carl Hiaasen's work, the Tilt-A-Whirl murder pushes Ceepak's deep sense of honor and integrity to the limits, as unexpected twists and turns keep the truth spinning wildly in every direction.

My Review: A first-person narrative by the brilliant, damaged sleuth's awestruck sidekick. A murder richly deserved, a plot cleverly sewn to established behaviors of irreproachable characters, and a very dark and twisted resolution that provides restitution for many past wrongs, all for the price of an insalata caprese on a baguette with taro chips.

I started reading this free Kindle edition this afternoon, nursing a sore back and a bad mood. I stopped a few minutes ago, drew a deep breath, and said, "golly gee willikers, that was a corking experience!" (Ceepak rubbed off on me a little. It's only temporary. I hope.)

I was rather constantly reminded that Ceepak was modeled on Sherlock Holmes, in fact a wee bit heavy-handedly (the cigarette butt, the musical obsession, the lighthouse), but honestly it never made the story less enveloping. The town and the townie-sidekick made me appreciate Ceepak's character's Sherlockian traits. The more Danny, out narrator, talks, the more Ceepak learns and, importantly, teaches. The specific information Ceepak seeks about the locations of stuff around the little resort town is less important than is the lesson that Danny is being offered at every step. It's so well-done that I suspect readers can whip right past that piece of subtext and lose no speck of pleasure in following Ceepak around as he pulls threads and worrys knots and always, always obeys his orders. Even when they come from people who have no idea what they're doing.

The crime scene team at the scene of the murder is led by a revolting slob instead of a brilliant, world-renowned forensic scientist, who happens to be away on vacation when this crime is committed...the murder of a billionaire. Hard luck! It's so awful how things don't happen the right way, although the sloppy lead forensic guy probably gets a come-uppance offstage. Which kinda sucks, I'd really have enjoyed seeing him suffer...though I have some hopes he'll reappear to be a thorn in the side of our Dudley Dooright detective, this shell-shocked love child of Sherlock and Adrian Monk.

I'm all ready to be a big fan. I'm hoping I'll be as happy after I read the next one. Because I read this on the !*&$^^!%%#% Kindle, I can't quote the nice, dry asides and observations that Danny, our Watson-meets-Archie Goodwin, makes, but I smiled a lot, chuckle a good bit, and laughed out loud at least three times.

Yeah, four stars. That's fair. The extra fractions of a star get deducted for a few small breaks, like an attitude shift on Danny's part that goes from up to down to up again a bit too quickly; the resolution of the original red herring being a smidge on the done-and-dusted side; and a bit at the end with Ceepak doing something I found, well, forced and unnecessary.

None of which should even slow you down in your sprint to the Kindle store to spend a *whopping* ninety-nine cents to procure your lease on access to the file. Five hours happily spent making a new bestie? For a lousy buck? Be a devil, risk it!

TILT-A-WHIRL, first of Ceepak and Boyle's Jersey Shore mysteries

MAD MOUSE (John Ceepak Mysteries #2)
CHRIS GRABENSTEIN
Chris Grabenstein
99¢ Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: It's almost Labor Day, and the end of summer could mean the end of someone's life in this exciting sequel to Chris Grabenstein's Tilt-a-Whirl. Young Danny Boyle, the part-time summer cop "down the shore" in Sea Haven, New Jersey, gets taken on a wild ride when he and his longtime beach buddies become the unwitting targets of a mad-man's twisted scheme for revenge. Fortunately, John Ceepak, the cop with a soldier's unshakeable code of honor, stays at Danny's side to help him negotiate the quick twists and turns that threaten to destroy his life, his friends, and everything about the world he loves. Whipping from the boardwalk to the beach and back again, Mad Mouse keeps zigging and zagging at a breakneck pace, all the way to the surprising finish.

My Review: Second verse, same as the first/Coulda got better....

I enjoyed the time off from the troubling events I'm seeing develop at Goodreads. I hid myself in this enjoyable, light-weight read...

...and *whammo* got the boom lowered on me. Every one of us has done things that, had we known what we were doing at the time, would never have been put into action. Fortunately for most of us, the people we've hurt or mistreated don't come after us with sniper weapons in hand and murder at heart. Danny Boyle, the cool kid from school who never left the town he grew up in, has some of those and here they come with guns and murder all at the ready.

Grabenstein's writing is smooth, very easy on the eyes and ears, and carefully crafted. He chooses the scenes of his story with a very practiced and able eye. He offers an interesting angle of view. But the impact of the story is never in doubt, since his main character is the one in the sniper's crosshairs. Readers of Tilt-A-Whirl are already invested in Danny, and those who start here are probably not that far behind.

In the end, though, after going on the ride with Danny, it's the perp that leaves one almost breathless in horror, pity, fear, loathing. It's all so, so pointless. Except to the unhappy victim. And I don't, this time, mean Danny or his friends.

Very affecting.

What worked less well for me was the grafted-on feeling that the romance, which apparently blew up overnight, left me with; the Ceepak presence was deployed in an oddly spotty manner, feeling not exactly perfunctory but less personal than in the first book; and the new character Buzz was, well, here I can say it, perfunctory. Quick strokes, convenient presence, but not integral or maybe integrated, into the action.

A series I will pursue, no doubt, and with pleasure. Just a few clouds in the sunshiney sky. Nothing to suggest even a rain shower, still less a storm. I like finding myself in Sea Haven, and that says a lot.

WHACK-A-MOLE, third John Ceepak Jersey Shore mystery and the best one yet

WHACK-A-MOLE (John Ceepak Mysteries #3)
CHRIS GRABENSTEIN
Chris Grabenstein
99¢ Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.6* of five

The Publisher Says: An innocent discovery on the beach in Sea Haven leads John Ceepak, the cop with an unshakeable code of honor, and his rookie partnet, the twentysomething wisecracker Danny Boyle, into the hunt for a long-dormant serial killer who might be crawling out of his hiding hole to strike again.

Like the relentless rodents in the Boardwalk arcade game, gruesome clues keep popping up all over the island as Ceepak (the former soldier who will not lie, cheat, or steal, nor tolerate those who do) finds himself up against an adversary with an even stricter code, a code he rigidly enforces.

When the killer targets his next victim, the consequences become dire for Ceepak and Boyle. This is a game they have to win!

My Review: A solid four-star outing for that Dudley Do-Right of the Jersey Shore, John Ceepak, and his wing man young Danny Boyle. One thing's for sure, the villain of the piece gets a hellacious run-around before he's brought to justice.

The first two books in the series were good fun, with lots of wisecracking and silliness from Danny, along with some very Monk-like fun-making at Ceepak's expense. This outing has the fun, less of the fun-making; in fact, the shoe goes very much on the other foot this outing. I enjoyed that.

I also enjoyed the darker and more intense pace of this entry in the series. It serves the characters well because it's about them growing up and filling in their roles as a team. There's so much more to work with in a book-three mystery, an established sense of place and a mode of communication and a web of memories to draw on. Grabenstein does all of that, stays true to Ceepak's character in every way and manages to continue Danny Boyle's maturation and education without *whap*smack*bang*ing us to notice it. In this book, Danny's lessons are pricey and yet completely relatable. Don't get me wrong, I was still hollering at the Kindle, "DON'T YOU DO THAT! NO NO!! NOT THAT!" Danny wasn't listening. In a world with smartphones, I think I can be excused for mistaking the Kindle for an old Dick-Tracy-style two-way wrist radio.

That's my story, anyway.

By the end of the book, when the stakes were ratcheted higher than ever before, I was over-pushing the paging buttons and having to back-track. I was that wrapped up in the ending. You know how the Big Reveal is so often the Middlin' Reveal? Not this time. Nope. Big Reveal is a biiiig surprise.

The solution to the crime isn't too shabby, either. Heh.